Wolf Solent: A Novel, Volume II

Book excerpt: When it was first published in 1929, John Cowper Powys’ rapturous novel of eros and ideas was compared with works by Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. Since then it has won the admiration of writers from Henry Miller to Iris Murdoch. Wolf Solent remains wholly unrivalled in its deft and risky balance of mysticism and social comedy, ecstatic contemplation of nature and unblinking observation of human folly and desire. Forsaking London for Ramsgard, a village in Dorsetshire, Wolf Solent discovers a world of pagan splendor and medieval insularity, riddled by ancient scandals and resentments. And there this poetic young man meets two women—the sensuous beauty Gerda and the ethereal gamine Christie—who will become the sharers of his body and soul. Audacious, extravagant, and gloriously strange, Wolf Solent is a twentieth-century masterpiece. This present volume is the first volume in a set of two. “The only book in the English language to rival Tolstoy.”—George Steiner “[Powys is] as domestic as Jane Austen, a genius like her at creating a cast of characters as part of a comedy and in a comic setting....[He is] as brilliant an explorer of our erotic being as D. H. Lawrence.”—New York Review of Books “A momentous work...of transcendent interest and great beauty.”—The New York Times Book Review “Filled with authentic characters and closely caught conversations, [Powys’s books] resemble Shakespeare in the interplay of cultured and ignorant, male and female.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Wolf Solent is a brilliant book...beautifully managed, and with the finest of inevitability.”—Conrad Aiken “In the beauty and freshness of its imagery and the sustained interest of its narrative, its power is without question. Its prose often rises to the cadence of poetry”—New York Herald Tribune “An epic of pagan beauty.”—Chicago Tribune